r he was absent, and Blakely and Curtis and Strong and I got
together in the tent, we discussed him, evolving various theories to
explain why he never wrote to anybody and why nobody ever wrote to him.
Had the man committed some terrible crime, and fled to the army to hide
his guilt? Blakely suggested that he must have murdered "the old folks."
What did he mean by eternally conning that tattered Latin grammar? And
was his name Bladburn, anyhow? Even his imperturbable amiability became
suspicious. And then his frightful reticence! If he was the victim of
any deep grief or crushing calamity, why did n't he seem unhappy? What
business had he to be cheerful?

"It's my opinion," said Strong, "that he 's a rival Wandering Jew; the
original Jacobs, you know, was a dark fellow."

Blakely inferred from something Bladburn had said, or something he had
not said--which was more likely--that he had been a schoolmaster at some
period of his life.

"Schoolmaster be hanged!" was Strong's comment. "Can you fancy a
schoolmaster going about conjugating baby verbs out of a dratted little
spelling-book? No, Quite So has evidently been a--a--Blest if I can
imagine _what_ he 's been!"

Whatever John Bladburn had been, he was a lonely man. Whenever I want
a type of perfect human isolation, I shall think of him, as he was in
those days, moving remote, self-contained, and alone in the midst of two
hundred thousand men.

II.

The Indian summer, with its infinite beauty and tenderness, came like a
reproach that year to Virginia. The foliage, touched here and there with
prismatic tints, drooped motionless in the golden haze. The delicate
Virginia creeper was almost minded to put forth its scarlet buds again.
No wonder the lovely phantom--this dusky Southern sister of the pale
Northern June--lingered not long with us, but, filling the once peaceful
glens and valleys with her pathos, stole away rebukefully before the
savage enginery of man.

The preparations that had been going on for months in arsenals and
foundries at the North were nearly completed. For weeks past the air had
been filled with rumors of an advance; but the rumor of to-day refuted
the rumor of yesterday, and the Grand Army did not move. Heintzelman's
corps was constantly folding its tents, like the Arabs, and as silently
stealing away; but somehow it was always in the same place the next
morning. One day, at last, orders came down for our brigade to move.

"We 're go